


Admitting isn't fixing, so then what is it worth?

by Negansplumbusinmyrumham



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King, it 2019 - Fandom
Genre: CSA, Child Abuse, M/M, Nothing good happens, Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self Harm, cocsa, henry has a horrible life, light spoilers, parick's fridge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 11:22:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21298640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Negansplumbusinmyrumham/pseuds/Negansplumbusinmyrumham
Summary: the tears in your jeans are the holes in your armoryou're the thoughts that I fearedyou're the mountain I've conquered
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Henry Bowers/Victor Criss/Patrick Hockstetter
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Admitting isn't fixing, so then what is it worth?

Henry knew enough about love to hate it. 

It was a calm that came just before or just after some devastation. 

It was the same shade as rage. 

It burned like hot-behind-the-ears crying on the long dust road from school when he was so alone he might as well have been dead or invisible and wished either were true. 

It was price and payment. 

It was tight, crushed the new bulge in his throat in, sucked all the empty space out of him until all his organs bruised and pushed acid up out of him like that day when his family farm came into sight. It was the sweat pouring out of his palms like drain water from the streets during those storms the Autumn he turned 12 (the paper had been so wet when he finally handed it to his father that the ink was smudged). 

Love was when that rock tore into Victor’s face and he threw his back twice as hard. It was not even feeling the ones that hit him until he was scratching at the scabs later on. 

It left gaps like what he felt sitting with his bare feet in the filthy water, wondering where he would sleep that night, wishing he was still in the tall grass picking out thorns and brambles with his gang the way apes groom in a tight little circle. 

Muggy and suffocating and lonely, the panic of buying time, of coming up short, of stealing it like pockets full of candy bars. Greedy as the mosquitoes, it left silence more void than what stuck between his lips and his teeth when he meant to tell about Hockstetter’s fridge and his hands and all that came out was, “Don’t go anywhere alone with pat, he’s weird.”

That stupid dog had felt love for him, and that was why he was so easy to kill. He perked up sweet when Henry came to the fence. He waited for Bowers, and wagged his tail in recognition at the dependable friend. 

Love was what made it no fun to get what he wanted in the end, what made the walk sad when he walked across to the farm where is lived. He’d been by its side as it vomited and convulsed, wishing he knew what real words of comfort sounded like so he could offer them but finding only vulgarities to harden himself, knowing this was the most important thing he’d done in his 12 years on earth. 

That night, he drank out of a can that smelled like his nightmares and was told that he was loved in something other than a spent, satiated slur. He was a man now, his father said, and he understood that the price of Butch’s arm around his shoulder the way a father should touch a son had been the love of the dog. 

It had licked his hand. In its absence, he found himself feeling that same vacuum whenever he passed the farmhouse and didn’t hear panting, paws against the fence. 

Love was what Tozier did for Kaspbrak when he and Patrick cornered them in the junkyard. Or had they walked up on him and Hockstetter? 

Either way, all Henry could hear was that squeaky voice, “Go blow your dad you mullet-wearing asshole!” He heard it for days. He wanted to shave his head, but imagined the hands in his hair migrating to grip his ears like they used to. Then Henry got him in the junkyard and he would show him- 

He would show him-

He would show him-

Richie’s glasses had broken into shards that stuck in his cheeks and he sputtered out cries with a mouth full of dirt but, beside an instinctual squirming that made it look like he was ring to swim right through the land and away from the pain, he put up no resistance. 

Pat had no interest in sticking around after they let Eddie out of the fridge and gave him his inhaler back. He was hyperventilating over the tiny flies that he couldn’t blink all the way out of his tear ducts until he was Richie on the ground.

Pat left, but Henry stayed behind an old car and watched the smaller boy grab his half-dressed friend into his arms and soothe and rock and dampen his own shirt like a rag to clean tender between his thighs the way his friends would never do for him- They’d call him a fag. 

Love was the stupid, nagging jealousy that made him crave to be part of that healing as if he hadn’t caused the pain himself, to tell Tozier, “Im not bigger than everybody. I’m small too, sometimes.” Love is what made him hate that little knit of losers more than anything else that summer, how they didn’t see that he was bleeding no matter how much he bled on them, how they all had something he knew he never would 

Love is what carried him to the corner of the ceiling all those nights, where he would watch a clone like from a scary science movie being undressed. 

It was the longing whisper reminding how much he looked like his mother. Those nights he was sure that love was the silence of a sheet bunched between his teeth, he way he lolled in the empty submission demanded of him. 

It was the way he waited until his door was closed again to cry, and why he changed the sheets and said nothing in the morning. 

Love was taking whatever his father’s body had to give his, being a punching bag or a wife or a slave and knowing to detect which he should be in the moment. 

It was slaving over dinner. 

It was the ache that never really faded just under his tailbone. 

It was bleaching out blood so he wouldn’t be beaten for ruining his briefs, and pressing around the bruises on his hips where his father bounced him in his lap until they spread enough to no longer resemble hand prints. 

It was telling the teacher to “shut the fuck up” when he came in with a gap in his mouth, too old to be losing baby teeth. 

It was playground fights early in the morning with older boys to explain away black eyes and split lips. 

It was learning not to wince when he put his cigarettes out on his own skin in front of his friends to convince them that all his burns were by his own hand.

_ “Henry’s crazy. Henry’s hardcore.” _

Love is what was absent in that haze, that all-consuming nothing he felt for everything but his favorite knife. 

It was what he was sure sparked when he saw the realization twist their faces like balloon animals. 

Love was the look of the clown on the grainy television, his face impossibly clear, eyes keeping Henry focused when he slid the knife across his father’s throat. Under that gaze lay ecstasy of a true void, of finally being what would destroy all the love in the world.

Love was the fear of the looming moon that promised to protect him.

Henry know just enough about love to hate it more than anything else.


End file.
